Our Age isn’t Dark quite yet, but it is growing dimmer by the day, as politicians deny the prospect that the Anthropocene has taken an irremediable toll on the planet. Critical Thinking is under attack, as is Higher Education itself, and the Arts — one of our primary modes of personal expression — and Independent Journalism are criticized for their un-American negativity, with the promise of “consequences” for egregious acts of deviance from the Party Line. These related phenomena are easily observable in major centers of intellectual discourse (university campuses like Harvard and Berkeley) and concentrations of high culture (e.g., New York City). But surely they are manifest on Main Street. It’s time to establish the Agincourt Academy of Arts & Sciences and imagine its role in the trenches of what has already become intellectual warfare.

What might have been the Academy’s origins? How has it shaped (or at least tried to shape) public discourse? Does it have a future in Trump’s Amerika? Time to find out.